Sixteen haiku sit under a title that promises one, and the mismatch is a clue. The sequence reads less like a single moment of nature-watching than a day's jottings from a city. We hear church music from far off, ride an elevator, sit in a Mexican diner, scrub a coffee cup, and finish on a bus where a phone rings and nobody answers. The central idea, I think, is a quiet struggle against loneliness and low spirits, fought with whatever small sensations are to hand. "Against unhappiness / paprika on potato / contends to the taste" is almost a manifesto. The contest is absurdly unequal, and the speaker still backs the paprika.
Most of the tercets follow the traditional 5-7-5 count. "Music from the church / at this distance, I will hear / only blended souls" fits exactly. But the poem doesn't police itself. "Mill that fine, grinders!" has a six-syllable middle line, followed by an exclamation mark and a lowercase "your," as if the thought couldn't wait. The last stanza opens a syllable short ("Ask not for whom"), so the line seems cut off before it can finish its quotation. There is no end rhyme, but sound still binds the poem. Look at the clustered p's of "paprika on potato," or the bumpy "hungry orange pelican." The most satisfying chime is half hidden: "Could be a bad night, / but I hate him on the right," where "night" and "right" clang together like the speaker's irritation.
Sound is also the poem's main subject. Church music arrives blurred by distance, the shutter cord taps, and sirens come twice, first as an "ebb" and later as "a thin scream beneath the drizzle." In the diner, "fiesta music bounces / off empty tables." The speaker is surrounded by noise and short of company. Distance is the poem's condition: "at this distance," "between me and freeze," and the elevator neighbour whose cooking the speaker smells but cannot place. "I won't know the name" is nicely ambiguous, since it could mean the cook or the dish. That is intimacy without acquaintance. Even the mention of Gang of Four, a post-punk band known for politically edged songs, works as a wry question. What would such a band make of the walls and heating that stand between a comfortable speaker and the cold?
The poem's method is the comic drop. "All is in fact one / and I must find communion / with these dog shit lumps" lifts a grand philosophical claim and lands it on the pavement. If everything is one, the speaker reasons, the worst bits must be included. The same irony colours the pair about the man on the right. The phrase "thirty minutes in" suggests a talk or lecture of some kind, though the poem never says. The speaker hates him almost at once, and all that survives is his line "Love is a practice." Hatred, it seems, is getting the practice.
The final stanza turns on a famous echo. "Ask not for whom / the cell phone rings" borrows from John Donne's "ask not for whom the bell tolls," where a ringing bell reminds everyone of their connection to everyone else. On this bus, "no one will answer," and the old insistence on connection becomes a ringing nobody claims. It is the sharpest version of the poem's worry that communion is something one must work at, without any promise that it will arrive.
Against that worry the poem sets imagination and attention. A concrete spreader becomes a "hungry orange pelican" with a "brown hose for its worm." Heavy machinery is turned into a bird at its meal. A coffee stain "traveled so quickly / to my yellow sponge," a small, vivid transfer of one thing into another. Even the single sunlit hour, an escape from an unexplained "punishment," ends in the question "shall I remember?", as if the speaker knows that noticing is the only way to keep such moments.
What makes the sequence worth reading is how it stretches the haiku habit of close looking to fit a modern, crowded, often lonely life. It lets in pop-music names, borrowed quotations, jokes and mess. The humour keeps the loneliness from turning into self-pity, and the attention keeps the humour from being a mere shrug. By the last line, the unanswered phone has become the poem's quiet question: who, if anyone, is listening?